Making sense of prior knowledge and learning

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Introduction

With the dawn of democracy in 1994 South Africa was accepted in the global community of nations. This new era has also brought about many societal challenges. One of the challenges facing the new democratic society was the limited knowledge and skills of the majority of its citizenry to engage with other nations in a competitive, technologically advanced and ever-changing political, economical, social and cultural environment. In an attempt to address this challenge, the new government introduced legislation such as the South African Qualifications Act, 1995 (Act 58 of 1995); the Skills Development Act, 1998 (Act 97 of 1998) and the Higher Education Act, 1997 (Act 101 of 1997), and other plans aimed at addressing the level of knowledge and skills of its citizens. In its endeavour to further enhance the knowledge and skills of society, especially at school level, government began developing a new curriculum.
The objective of the new curriculum, according to the Revised National Curriculum Statement (Department of Education, 2002a), was to take up the challenge posed by – • the scale of change in the world (i.e. the growth and development of knowledge and technology and the demands of the 21st century, which required students to be exposed to different and higher level skills and knowledge than those required by the former South African curriculum); and • the fact that South Africa had changed (the new South Africa required revision to reflect new values and principles based on the Constitution). What does it mean to expose students to different and higher level skills and knowledge? How would a curriculum accomplish this? The development of a new curriculum cannot be sufficient if it is not accompanied by the development of resources – both human and physical – to enhance higher-level skills and knowledge. According to Spady (1994) to successfully implement a curriculum to enhance skills and knowledge, that curriculum should focus on and organise everything around what is « essential for all students ». This he said is to enable successful learning at the end of their learning experience. It also needs sufficient resources if students are to learn successfully. Resources here mean both the physical and the human resources required to enhance teaching. « Physical resources » are, for example, well-equipped classes, laboratories, libraries, etc. « Human resources » refer to administrators and lecturers who are qualified in their respective fields to contribute to successful learning. In the case of teaching, lecturers should not only be qualified, but also knowledgeable in the art of teaching a specific subject matter content. This means lecturers should understand the content of their subject matter and the pedagogy to teach it successfully. Successful teaching is teaching that results in meaningful learning or understanding. Understanding something according to Wandersee and Griffard (2002) is “to explicitly connect it to one’s prior knowledge and experiences in a non-trivial way” (p.29).
Meaningful learning can therefore be enhanced when the lecturer has sufficient and relevant knowledge to understand how students use their prior knowledge during learning. To enhance meaningful learning the lecturer should be in a position to demonstrate the « grasp of, and response to the relationship between knowledge of content, teaching and the learning in ways that attest to notions of practice as being complex and interwoven » (Loughran, Mulhall & Berry, 2004, p.370). In fact, the knowledge described by Loughran et al., (2004) above is what Shulman (1986) termed « pedagogical content knowledge » (p.9). It is an understanding of the relationship between knowledge of content and teaching and learning, and enables the lecturer to represent and formulate the subject in a manner that makes it comprehensible for the student (Shulman, 1986; 1987). The qualified and knowledgeable lecturer should not only have pedagogical content knowledge to succeed in his or her teaching. In addition, the lecturer should also understand the students’ background and the factors contributing to students’ learning. According to Ausubel (1968), the main factor contributing to learning is one’s existing knowledge. The definition of understanding cited earlier highlights the important role that the individual’s existing knowledge plays in learning and especially in understanding: One needs to connect newly acquired information to what is already known (referred to as one’s « prior knowledge » in this study) in order to understand.
But what is prior knowledge? Different people have defined prior knowledge differently. Jonassen and Grabowski (1993) define it as « knowledge, skills or ability that students bring to the learning process” (p. 416). Dochy and Alexander (1995) describe it as « the whole of a person’s knowledge » (p.228). What students bring to the learning process is therefore what they would use to acquire new knowledge. Based on these definitions, the rationale is that understanding students’ prior knowledge would enrich lecturers’ teaching and learning planning of their lectures before engaging in teaching. On the whole, the lecturer should have an understanding of a student’s learning weaknesses and strengths on the basis of his or her prior knowledge. This understanding would help the lecturer in the planning of relevant and effective teaching and learning activities. The purpose of this study is therefore to explore and understand students’ use of prior knowledge to construct understanding and generate meaning of selected concepts and processes on the topic of acids and bases. The study was based on first-year students studying towards a National Diploma in Analytical Chemistry at the Tshwane University of Technology in South Africa. For ease of reference, the topic on acids and bases would generally be referred to as « chemistry » where it is not specifically stated.

Background and rationale

Education and higher education institutions in particular, especially in South Africa, are faced with the challenge of adapting their programmes and curricula to satisfy the needs of an economy that has to compete in the global community. These institutions therefore have to produce graduates with the knowledge, abilities and skills that will ensure their competitiveness at all levels of the local and international economic landscape in which they participate. The economy for which today’s institutions of higher learning (universities and universities of technology) are required to prepare their graduates can be grouped into three interrelated categories that cannot function separately (Castells, 1996). These categories are – • an economy in which productivity and competitiveness are based on knowledge and information; • a global economy which has the capacity to work as a unit in real time on a planetary scale of core activities; and • an economy with technological, organisational and institutional capacity. Undeniably, the kind of economy Castells describes here relies on knowledge and the individuals’ capacity to create new knowledge. Individuals aspiring to participate in such an economy must therefore have the capacity to create new knowledge since knowledge in this economy changes as fast as it is created.
This knowledge changes as fast as it does because (Castells, 1996) « new information and communication technologies allow fast processing and distribution of information throughout the entire realm of productive activity » (p.2). Institutions of higher learning, especially those in developing countries such as South Africa must therefore develop teaching and learning strategies, whose application would produce graduates capable of independently generating relevant knowledge. With this knowledge graduates would engage productively in the economy Castells describes above. However, students entering the higher education system are different in terms of their individual learning abilities. Most of these students come from a schooling system of limited teaching and learning resources. In most instances these students’ prior knowledge is less developed. Consequently they find it difficult to engage productively in higher-order cognitive learning. For example, in South Africa (Nkomo (1990), the majority of these students are the products of an inferior education system. They come into higher education studies with poor quality prior knowledge. Nkomo (1990) further argues that the segregated education system deliberately subjected Africans, Coloureds and Indians to intellectual underdevelopment.
According to Nkomo (1990) this education system was meant to provide the then government with « an ideological cornerstone for the social segregation, economic exploitation and political oppression of these groups calibrated according to their location on racially hierarchical social system » (p.1). In fact, most students who lack the capacity to learn meaningfully are products of teachers who themselves are the products of an education system that promoted an intellectually underdeveloped (mostly black) society. The teachers also studied under a system where resources were deliberately minimised for the three racial groupings mentioned earlier, while maximised for their white counterparts. As a result, schools and higher learning institutions meant for these communities could not develop teachers and other professionals at the competency level of their white counterparts. The « gap » between what was taught and learned by white and black citizens in South Africa was (and still is) apparent in different areas of the society. More significantly, the “gap” is apparent in the socio-economic, education and skills spheres.

Purpose statement

The main purpose of teaching is to facilitate and enhance learning by students. However, teaching often has limited success in guiding students from their pre-instructional conceptual frameworks to new understandings (Bodner, 1986).
That is, teaching does not always result in the lecturer’s intended learning. This is so because of the complexities surrounding teaching and learning. The failure to achieve intended learning outcomes in some instances could be ascribed to the limited understanding of lecturers and instructional designers of factors that affect teaching and learning. According to von Glasersfeld (1995) lecturers too often prepare their teaching strategies and procedures from « the naive assumption that what we ourselves perceive and infer from our perceptions is there ready-made for the students to pick up, if only they had the will to do so » (p.5). This attitude makes it even more difficult for students to learn in general and to learn chemistry in particular; especially students coming from poorly resourced teaching and learning backgrounds. This attitude (based on the practice not to assess students’ prior knowledge before teaching) is prevalent in most schools in South Africa. In addition (Gabel 1999), students encounter problems learning chemistry because of the many abstract concepts in chemistry. Students are sometimes taught without the use of analogies or models. This makes chemistry difficult to understand and learn. The abstract nature of chemistry is further compounded by assumptions that lecturers make about the levels of students’ knowledge and their ability to learn in a particular domain.
How, then, do we overcome the effect of the legacy of poor teaching and learning resources, especially in science learning? Questions occupying most instructional designers’ and lecturers’ minds, are what factors affect successful teaching, how they do that, and how they could be overcome to achieve intended outcomes of teaching? The different knowledge bases that students (i.e. first-year students) bring into the learning situation is what instructional designers and lecturers especially chemistry lecturers need to understand if they are to answer the question: How do I help my students to learn if I do not know what they know, how they know it and how they learned it? The purpose of this study is therefore to understand how students construct understanding and generate meaning during learning. Understanding students’ learning in this study was based on von Glasersfeld’s (1996) view of learning. According to this view learning is a constructive activity in which students themselves carry out knowledge construction. Within this perspective the lecturer does not dispense knowledge but provides students with opportunities and incentives to build knowledge. With this understanding of learning, some of the questions asked about understanding students’ knowledge construction may be answered.

TABLE OF CONTENTS :

• Abstract
• CHAPTER ONE General orientation of the study
  • 1.1 Introduction
  • 1.2 Background and rationale
  • 1.3 Purpose statement
  • 1.4 Research question(s)
  • Major question
  • Research sub-questions
  • 1.5 Aims and objectives of the study
  • 1.6 Significance of the study
  • 1.7 Literature review
  • 1.8 Research methodology
    • 1.8.1 Research design
    • 1.8.2 Instrumentation
  • 1.9 Summary
• CHAPTER TWO Making sense of prior knowledge and learning
  • 2.1 Introduction
  • 2.2 Understanding learning
    • 2.2.1 Behavioural view on learning
    • 2.2.2 Cognitive view on learning
    • 2.2.3 Constructivist view on learning
  • 2.3 Understanding knowledge
  • 2.4 Knowledge acquisition
    • 2.4.1 Knowledge construction
    • 2.4.2 All meaning is relational
  • 2.5 Origin, nature and learning of science
    • 2.5.1 The nature of science
    • 2.5.2 Nature of chemistry
  • 2.6 Learning science: A constructivist view
  • 2.7 Teaching science
    • 2.7.1 Understanding the process stage of teaching
    • 2.7.2 Culture of science teaching
    • 2.7.3 The language of science and the language of scientific teaching
  • 2.8 Practical work in science teaching
    • 2.8.1 Aims of practical work
    • 2.8.2 Practical work as a teaching strategy
    • 2.8.3 Cognitive goals: intellectual development
    • 2.8.4 Creative thinking and problem solving
    • 2.8.5 Practical goals
    • 2.8.6 Affective goals: attitude and interest
  • 2.9 Conceptual framework
    • 2.9.1 Mapping prior knowledge
    • 2.9.2 Prior knowledge as a bridge and/or barrier in learning
  • 2.10 Summary
• CHAPTER THREE Research design and methodology
  • 3.1 Introduction
  • 3.2 Research methodology
  • 3.3 Research design
    • 3.3.1 Instrumentation
    • 3.3.2 Defining the content
    • 3.3.3 Obtaining information about student conception
  • 3.4 Data collection methods and procedures
    • 3.4.1 Data collection methods
    • 3.4.2 Explaining data collection instruments
    • 3.4.3 Data analysis process
    • 3.4.4 Specification of analysis
  • 3.5 Addressing issues of trustworthiness
    • 3.5.1 Pilot study
    • 3.5.2 Triangulation
    • 3.5.3 Member checks
    • 3.5.4 Peer reviews
  • 3.6 Summary
• CHAPTER FOUR Data processing and management
  • 4.1 Introduction
  • 4.2 Data presentation
  • 4.2.1 Context for data analysis
  • 4.3 Data Analysis
    • 4.3.1 Analysis: Case A (Exhibits 4.1 to 4.4)
    • 4.3.2 Analysis: Case B (Exhibits 4.5 to 4.8)
    • 4.3.3 Analysis: Case C (Exhibits 4.9 to 4.12)
  • 4.4 Summary
• CHAPTER FIVE Findings, conclusion and recommendations
  • 5.1 Introduction
  • 5.2 Description of the analysis framework
  • 5.3 Synthesis and explanation
    • 5.3.1 Finding 1: Specification of a concept
    • 5.3.2 Finding 2: Instantiation
    • 5.3.3 Finding 3: Error prevention
  • 5.4 Significance for instruction, instructional design and assessment
  • 5.5 Framework for understanding prior knowledge for meaningful learning
  • 5.6 Implications for further research
  • 5.7 Reflections on the study
    • 5.7.1 Reflections on the limitations of the study
    • 5.7.2 Reflections on the significance of the study
  • 5.8 Conclusion
  • References
  • APPENDIX A Observation and Interview Schedule
  • APPENDIX B Prior Knowledge State Test
  • APPENDIX C Practical work task
  • APPENDIX D Propositional statements representing knowledge of acids and bases and titration processes
  • APPENDIX E Geographical map of South Africa
  • APPENDIX F Approval to conduct interviews
  • APPENDIX G Ethics clearance certificate

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